The 'Red International of Labour Unions' (RILU, Russian abbreviation Profintern) was a central instrument for the spreading of international communism during the inter-war period. This comprehensive and scholarly history of the organisation, based on extensive research in the former communist archives in Moscow and East Berlin, sheds significant light on the international trade union movement of the period. Tosstorff shows how the RILU began as a revolutionary alliance of syndicalists and communists in defiance of the social democratic International Federation of Trade Unions. His text...

Paul Frölich was a key figure in the formative years of German Communism. From a working-class family, he was active in the Social Democratic Party from the late 1890s, a left radical opposed to the First World War, and a founder member of the KPD. His previously unpublished memoir, only recently discovered, casts valuable new light on a key period, particularly the Comintern intervention that led to the disastrous ‘March action’ of 1921. The text on which the present, slightly abridged edition is based was originally published in German as Im radikalen Lager: Politische...